Rating and value of paintings by Gabriele Münter

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Rating and value of the artist Gabriele Münter  

Gabriele Münter is a German artist known to modern art enthusiasts. Now, the prices of her works are rising at the auctioneers' gavel.

Her oils on canvas are particularly prized, especially by German buyers, and the price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €20 to €1,737,350, a significant delta but one that speaks volumes about the value that can be attributed to the artist's works.

In 2020, his oil on canvas Yellow house with apple tree/landscape, dating from 1910 sold for €1,737,350, while it was estimated at between €1,437,800 and €2,135,142. Its price has risen sharply.

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

The artist's works and style

Gabriele Münter (1877 - 1962) was a German artist associated with Expressionism and the Die Blaue Reiter group. She developed a deeply Expressionist style, influenced by the German avant-gardes of the early 20th century, with a highly personal style that combines formal simplification, vivid colors and clear mass structuring.

She uses thick black outlines to define shapes, in the manner of stained glass or Bavarian folk art. The palette is dominated by pure, often non-realistic tones (intense blue, lemon yellow, acid green and vermilion red).

She uses color as a vehicle for emotion rather than description, rejecting realistic shading in favor of flat tints. Chromatic associations create visual tensions that give energy and life to the composition.

She mostly paints in oil on board or canvas, often in small to medium format. Her brushstrokes are flat and fluid, with little substance but a confident, almost naive application in her economy of means. She eliminates anecdotal details to get to the essence of the motif: stylized houses, schematic mountains and portraits with fixed expression.

She received academic training, then was influenced by the Fauvists, Matisse, Japanese and primitive art, as well as by Kandinsky, her companion. She adopted the principles of Bavarian folk art: frontality, stylization and folk motifs.

Münter was also influenced by medieval stained glass, icons and prints. Alpine landscapes, Bavarian villages, scenes of domestic life and self-portraits dominate her output.

Her vision is often intimate, even in landscapes, where nature is a mental projection rather than a topographical survey. She likes to paint everyday objects or isolated figures, in a climate of silent contemplation.

She produces numerous ink drawings, watercolors and prints, and cultivates a graphic approach close to the sketchbook, with clean lines, often without perspective. Her woodcuts reveal an extreme simplification, akin to art brut or children's work.

She doesn't seek to rival Kandisnsky or Jewlensky on the terrain of pure abstraction. Her style remains figurative but condensed, with a strong emotional intensity, through a stylized representation of the visible world.

She occupies a place apart, balancing between lyrical expression, introspection and popular memory.

The life of Gabriele Münter     

Born in Berlin in 1877, Gabriele Münter came from a cultivated bourgeois family. She lost both her parents in her teens, reinforcing her early independence. She took drawing lessons in Düsseldorf, then at the women's school of the Munich Artists' Association, since fine art was forbidden to women.

In 1901, she entered the Phalanx art school in Munich, where she met Wassily Kandinsky, who became her mentor and companion. She took part in study trips with him to Europe and North Africa, experimenting with plein-air painting, printmaking and drawing, and was influenced by the French avant-garde and German folk art.

She helped found the Die Blaue Reiter group in 1911, along with Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Auguste Macke and others. In 1909, she bought a house in Murnau am Staffelsee, Bavaria. This became a place of artistic creation and experimentation.

She painted numerous landscapes of the region, with simplified forms and saturated colors. The house is now a museum dedicated to her work. In 1914, Kandinsky left Germany at the outbreak of war, and their relationship ended without explanation.

Münter went through a period of artistic withdrawal, marked by loneliness and disinterest in the art world. She continued to paint, but distanced herself from official circles, until she was rediscovered in the 1930s.

During the interwar period, she treasured works by Kandinsky, Marc, Klee and others. During the Nazi regime, it hid works described as " degenerate art ". At the end of the war, she donated an exceptional collection of major Blaue Reiter pieces to Munich's Lenbachhaus.

Gabriele Münter was not officially recognized until the 1950s. She received several tributes and exhibitions during her lifetime, including a retrospective in Munich in 1957, and died in 1962 in Murnau, leaving a body of work rich in several hundred paintings, drawings and prints.

Today, the artist is considered a pioneer of modernism and one of the few women recognized in German Expressionism, alongside Marie Louise von Motesiczky or Marianne von Wereflin.

Focus on House in Murnau with garden, circa 1909

This oil-on-canvas work was produced during the pivotal period of Münter's stylistic turnaround, measures 33 x 44 cm and is housed at Munich's Lenbachhaus Museum in the permanent collection.

It depicts Münter's house in Murnau, seen from the outside with its flower-filled garden, in a slightly elevated perspective. The bright yellow facade, green shutters and garden in the foreground create a structured yet lively composition.

The frontal framing gives an impression of stability, almost symbolic, like a personal anchor. The palette used is very vivid (lemon yellow, royal blue, meadow green and vermilion red). The colors are applied in flat tones, without modeling or gradation, giving the whole a luminous, almost naïve appearance.

The whole is bathed in an even, non-naturalistic yet highly expressive light. In this work, she works with thick black outlines, characteristic of Münter's style at the time, inspired by Bavarian folk art.

The forms are simplified and almost geometric, the house is treated as a box and the trees as compact masses. There is an absence of linear depth, but a balance in the organization of planes (garden, facade, sky).

The work illustrates Münter's desire to reinterpret reality through subjectivity, without abandoning it altogether. Here, the garden becomes the expression of an inner world, between serenity and vigor. The Murnau house is a refuge and creative center, and this painting is a form of personal pictorial manifesto.

This painting synthesizes the group's aesthetic (stylized forms, pure colors and a direct relationship with the landscape). It embodies the idea of an emotional and spiritual art, capable of conveying states of mind through formal simplification.

The influence of Kandinsky is perceptible, but Münter retains a solid figuration and a grounding in the visible.

His signature

Not all of Gabriele Münter's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here's a first example of his signature:

Expertise your property

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